August 12, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
Part Two of How Humans Make Their Reality
From Point of View To Point of Vibration.
What Moves You, Shakes You, and Vibrates Through You Now Carries Sight's Old Authority Over What Is Real
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, yesterday you examined the human process of making reality, leading to the question of what our dominant sense is today. Now that I understand that the bias of communication throws the senses out of an equal ratio with one another, upsetting the equilibrium of the senses, or what we call the common sense, let me ask the plain question: What is our dominant sense today?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Our dominant sensory bias today is increasingly proprioceptive, but we must distinguish that from touch. Touch is not merely one sense among the others. Touch is the interaction of the senses, the resonant interval created when sight, sound, movement, pressure, and the other senses act upon one another. Print culture heightened the eye and gave man a fixed point of view from which to stand outside the world and inspect it. Electricity destroys that visual line. McLuhan's Through the Vanishing Point describes precisely this passage out of the visual world of perspective and into acoustic, multiple, multisensuous space. Progress literally stopped with electricity because everything is now available at once. There is no longer a simple movement from one thing to the next. There isn't any part of the past that is not with us. Huge speedup means there is no more past in the old sequential sense. Everywhere is here and every time is now.
Electric man therefore loses the stable visual position from which print man constructed his reality. He sends himself around the world as image, voice, and information while his body remains behind. He becomes discarnate. Underneath the multisensuous interplay of touch, however, the body continues registering movement, position, pressure, resistance, force, and vibration through the proprioceptive sense. I believe this largely subconscious bodily register has become one of electric man's tests of what is real. The subwoofer pushes sound beneath ordinary hearing until it is felt in the chest. Art comes off the wall and surrounds the spectator. Jogging, yoga, CrossFit, push-ups, and other bodily disciplines retrieve weight and resistance. The reporter with the microphone never asks what did you see or what did you hear. He asks how did you feel, every time, even over a coffin. If something moves us, shakes us, presses upon us, or vibrates through us, the bodily response itself acquires the authority that visual evidence once possessed.
In that limited sense, electric man begins to resemble the amoeba. The point is not biological equivalence but sensory condition. The amoeba does not stand outside its environment and contemplate it from a detached point of view. Its whole body participates in the encounter. Electric man is being pushed toward a comparable condition of total involvement. Touch becomes the resonant interplay of the senses, while proprioception supplies the body's largely subconscious reading of what that involvement is doing to it. We have therefore moved from point of view to point of vibration, from a reality inspected at a distance to a reality increasingly authenticated within the body itself. Print man stood outside the world and looked at it. Electric man is inside the world and knows it only by what he feels in his own body.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com